Part 3

A hydroponics corporal, S.C., spoke up. "She was relieved of duty as soon as she heard about her husband's death, sir. Someone should have stayed with her. She went up to Level Eight to be alone. There are only two of us on duty there through the night. She must have blundered off the walkway, blinded by her tears. However it happened, she caught hold of a lighting-cable where the insulation was frayed, and was electrocuted the moment she touched the wet seeding-bed. Colonel Nef found her there."

"I was going to console her on Gabriel Piacentelli's death," Nef said. "Leave the body here and clear out, all of you." No refrigeration was needed for Paula's corpse, of course. An uncontaminated Axenite was preserved by purity. The body might dry a bit, the integrity of the internal organs suffer somewhat from the corrosive effects of their own juices: but Paula's corpse would otherwise remain uncorrupted until taken outside and buried in bug-dirt. "Hartford," Nef said, "I'd like to have a talk with you."

"I'm still on O.G., sir," Hartford said.

"And I relieve you of that duty," Nef snapped. "Come up to my quarters."

Nasty Nef's sitting-room had the only window in the Barracks, a skylight through which poured the brilliance of Kansas's pyrotechnic flood of stars. "Rest, Hartford. Sit down. Brandy?"

Hartford allowed that he could use some.

"What do you think of tonight's adventure, Lee?" Nef asked. "Don't look startled. I know the first name of every officer and non-com in the Regiment."

"What happened, sir, was horrible," Hartford said.

"I understand your feelings," Nef said. "Two tragic accidents, killing your two closest friends the same night. I am certain that the loss of these comrades will fire your zeal for getting the Stinkers under control. Isn't that right, Lee?" Nef took a cigar from the humidor next his chair.

"With all respect, sir," Hartford said, placing his empty brandy-glass on the table to his right, "I can hardly see how the events tonight were caused by the Indigenous Hominids."

"You must use the official name for the Gooks, mustn't you?" Nef mused. His voice turned harsh: "Someone stripped the safety-suit off Piacentelli, Mister."

* * * * *

Hartford nodded, his face pale. The "A" of the Axenite's alphabet was Apprehension. As a germ-free--axenic, gnotobiotic--human being, he is superior in most ways to ordinary men. He's usually larger and stronger. He never has dental caries, pimples, appendicitis, the common cold or certain cancers. No matter how much or how long he sweats, the Axenite doesn't stink; nor do his other excretions. On a contaminated world, however, the Axenite is a tender flower indeed. A baby's breath can be death to him, if that baby be a "normal" human; for no microbe is benign to the man without antibodies. To him a drop of rain may reek with pestilence, the scent of evening may be a lethal gas. "I can't understand their stripping Pia, sir," he said. "Why would they do such a terrible thing?"

"Because they're Stinkers!" Nef said. "Can you imagine what it must be like to be one of them? Every inch of your skin a-crawl with living filth, your guts packed with foulness, your whole frame a compromise with rottenness? Do you wonder that they'd delight to make us as unwholesome as they are themselves?" Colonel Nef lighted the cigar he'd been mulling. "Lee, do you think one Stinkerville destroyed is too high a price for them to pay for having murdered two Axenite troopers? For Piacentelli's wife is as much their victim as her husband."

Hartford shook his head. "I'm not sure, sir. What bothers me more than anything else is that it's my fault Pia went out last night. He asked me to arrange for him to replace the scheduled picket officer, and I did."

"Lee, why was Piacentelli so anxious to pull this extra duty?" Nef asked.

Hartford tried unobtrusively to squirm his chair out of the jet-stream from Nef's cigar. "He told me he wanted to work on the language, sir," he said. "Pia really had such a project. He'd never had contact with anyone with a speech other than Standard before, and the problem of transducing one language into another fascinated him. The Kansans call their speech _Nihon-go_. Pia taught me to understand some of it."

"A waste of your time, Lee," Nef said. "You'll never have occasion to speak it. Be that as it may, unless Piacentelli was attempting to coax a course in Bedroom Kansan from a Stinker maiden, I can hardly understand why his lexigraphical labors should require him to unsuit himself. No, Piacentelli was deliberately murdered."

"I'm puzzled, sir," Hartford admitted. "When we tossed those smoke-candles, I heard Pia shouting for us to stop it. Would he have done so if the Indigenous Hominids had him captive? Why did none of the natives lift a hand against us, though we were burning their homes? Why did Paula Piacentelli seem to know why Pia was going outside tonight? Why did he take a microscope with him? Why did Paula kill herself?"

* * * * *

"Don't noise that last 'why' around the Barracks, Mister," Nef growled. "Officially, she died in tear-blinded grief, an accident." He smiled. "Whatever our reason for burning out Stinkerville, Lee, we got it done. The fact that those half-humans down the hill bred and sweat and poisoned the soil within half an hour's walk has been a stench in my nostrils ever since we got here. Now they're gone. I'm as sorry as you that the Piacentellis are dead. But the manner of their dying was such as to assure Axenic mankind a new home."

"I'm not sure I understand you, sir."

Nef poured them each a second brandy. He raised his; Hartford of necessity followed suit. "To Brotherhood," the colonel said. He stared into Hartford's eyes. "To _the_ Brotherhood," he amended.

Hartford was tired, confused and in awe of Nef's rank; otherwise he might have ventured protest. Nef sipped his drink. "I must emphasize, Lee, that what I say is my opinion only, not Axenite policy. You see my point."

"I do, sir," Hartford said.

"Forgive me, then, for prefacing my remarks with a bit of truism," Nef said. "In all history before gnotobiotic man was cut from his mother through cellophane, the human being was never pure organism. Before us, every man who ever lived was, in fact, one mammal plus the sum of millions of viruses, rickettsia, bacteria, fungi and molds. When the old philosophers asked, 'What is man?' the answer could only be: 'Foul smell and blood in a bag.' We're the first men beyond that, Lee. The first real men, True Men, members of the winner-species. _Homo gnotobioticus_.

"We must destroy the bridge that led to us. We must destroy the Stinkers. Not just these quasi-human natives here on Kansas, but the Stinkers on Earth, and on every other planet where bug-laden man has followed Axenite. What chance has _Homo sapiens_ to match his sapiency against _Homo gnotobioticus_, when he is a bifurcate septic tank, a polyculture of a thousand kinds of living dirt?"

Hartford finished his brandy, wishing he were anywhere else than in Nasty Nef's quarters, tired, ill at ease and a little drunk from the two brandies. "What do you propose, sir?" he asked with Academy politeness.

"Aha!" Nef rejoiced, pouring them each another drink. "You justify my trust, Lee. You perceive that I speak not merely if-ly, philosophically, but as a man of action, leashed only by temporary practicality." He leaned back in his chair and regarded Hartford more as a sculptor might regard a recent product than a father a son, with uncritical approval. "Where were you born, Lee?"

"On Titan, sir."

* * * * *

"I thought so. You have the mark of natal excellence," Nef said. "You're a second or third-generation Axenite, then?"

"Third, sir," Hartford said.

"Splendid. Your grandparents were from their mothers' wombs untimely ripp'd; your parents and yourself born normally, in germ-free ambience. How fortunate we are, you and I! Third-generation Axenites. Eff-two of a new race." Nef paused in his recital. "There is one fact that chafes us, though. We, perforce the Columbuses of tomorrow, explorers of the planets beyond even the stars we see here on the frontier, are held back by our Stinker cousins. They have the proper feeling, that only pure man might pioneer the alien worlds, for fear of destroying what he finds there. But who will inherit those planets when we've finished our explorations? Who will at the last till the fields of Kansas?"

"Colonists from Earth, sir," Hartford said. "From Eurus, Tinkle, Westside, Unashamed, T'ang, Williams's World and Hope. From all the planets normal man has colonized."

"Doesn't that annoy you, Lee?" Nef asked. "That our work's fruit is to be enjoyed by shiploads of Stinkers?"

"They're as human as we, sir," Hartford said. He smiled. "You might say they just haven't had our advantages."

"You're tender-minded, Lee," Nef said. "We garrison a hundred worlds on the Frontier, planets our Stinker masters mustn't visit yet, least Man contaminate some life-form yet unmet. We pioneer, clear planets as safe, and move on. For reward, we Axenites have three worlds of our own in the M'Bwene System, axenized for our use; we have the Academies on Luna and Titan, and a dome on Pluto. _It's not enough._ We are the new men, the next-comers to humanity. We must have worlds of our own. I, and the Brotherhood whose hand here I am, intend that Kansas shall be ours."

"What about the Stinkers?" Hartford asked. "What will happen to them if we decide to axenize Kansas?"

"Maybe they'll leave," Colonel Nef said, smiling in the manner that had won him the name "Nasty." "A few more punitive expeditions like tonight's--an incendiary grenade was thrown at Kansannamura, did you know that, Lee? I threw it--and we'll have no Stinkers underfoot. We soon will be able to mop and polish this world to our own high standards. We'll walk this lovely world without safety-suits and breathe unfiltered air. We'll enter into our birthright, Lee." Nef gazed at his cigar admiringly, though it had gone out. "So much for the moment, Brother Hartford," he said. "Perhaps we'd both do well to get some sleep."

Hartford jumped to attention and formally requested permission to withdraw. Nef nodded. Hartford about-faced and left the room.

VI

The things the colonel had told him hadn't fallen into place in his mind yet. Hartford was numb of thought.

Back in his own room in B.O.Q. the numbness cleared a bit. He poured himself a drink. Somehow, he thought, he'd become fairhaired boy to an Attila the Hun, an Alaric the Goth, a Hitler, a Haman; an Ashurbanipal I, a Rameses II. For Nef was equally with these a servant of Siva the Destroyer, with his plan to make Man pure.

His purification would involve the destruction of all non-axenic men and women all the way from the Home World to the newest beach-head on the Frontier; the sterilization of a hundred worlds as culture media for the new race; and the planting on the newly axenized soil of colonies of _Homo gnotobioticus_, the feeder-on-hydroponic-greens, the inodorous, the thin-gutted, the strong toothed Superman.

Nef's pogrom had begun with the raid on the village, Hartford mused, his arms behind his head as he lay on his bunk. Nef had decided that this green and pleasant world belonged to the silver men, the true men, the new men. Us, Hartford thought. Earth's Stinkers, ordinary humanity with its common cold and its caries, would follow the Kansan Indigenous Hominid, and the Great Auk, into history.

The double funeral of the Lieutenants Piacentelli was to be held at Retreat, outside the Barracks. Hartford wondered a bit at the haste with which the two bodies were to be consigned to the earth of Kansas. Perhaps haste was necessary because of the micro-organisms with which poor Pia's corpse was necessarily contaminated.

Hartford grimaced. Contaminated humans must lead disgusting lives. They smelled of ferments, were bloated with bacterially elaborated gases, suffered rot in their very teeth. Their corpses--poor forefathers!--suffered corruption that would never touch an Axenite, whose unembalmed cadaver would last longer than the best-mummified Pharaoh.

Whatever mysterious errand it had been that had taken Piacentelli outside the Barracks, it had killed him. It was over.

Hartford marched the Terrible Third into position facing the graves, cut into the soil at the base of the hundred-foot flagpole. The entire regiment, less only the handful of men and women necessary to secure the Barracks, was on the Parade Ground. Colonel Nef, his scarlet safety-suit brilliant in the light of the setting sun, stood beside the graves, a finger of his right gauntlet inserted to mark his place in the black _Book of Honors and Ceremonies_.

The regiment stood at parade-rest as a truck brought the bodies of two comrades through its ranks. As the improvised hearse halted and twelve blue-suited casket-bearers stepped forward to lift the flag-draped boxes, Nef called the regiment to attention. The bearers slow-marched the caskets to the graves and placed them on the lowering-devices.

* * * * *

Nef's words of funeral were few. He spoke of the dedication of the two Axenites being laid to rest and bitterly accused the Stinkers--this word seemed rude, in so formal a setting--of having murdered the young couple. He spoke of condign justice, and of revenge.

This done, he called: "Escort, less firing-party. Present, HAHMS! Firing-party, FIRE THREE VOLLEYS!"

The shots of the Dardick-rifles echoed down the plateau to the smoldering village below. The Regimental Bugler, standing between the heads of the graves, flicked on his instrument. As the last volley spat from the muzzles of the rifles, the bugler played _Taps_.

Four men stepped forward to recover and fold the green-silk Pioneer colors, and the caskets were lowered to corruption in alien earth. The banner crept down the flagstaff, and the funeral was over.

Bone-weary, Hartford went from the Syphon to the refresher-room, where he checked his safety-suit and hung it.

Another officer was there, still in his blue safety-suit. Hartford wondered sleepily why he'd so long postponed unsuiting. Even the fellow's helmet was sealed. "Our first deaths on Kansas," Hartford remarked, wanting to coax the man into conversation and learn who he was. "I'd never realized till now that we're really soldiers, subject to violent death and formal burying." The man must be a replacement, come in on the supply ship a month ago, Hartford thought. Black hair, crewcut. Tanned. Must be from one of the M'Bwene Worlds, where an Axenite's naked skin can bear unfiltered sunlight. "Both the Piacentellis were my friends," Hartford said, determined to coax speech from the stranger.

The man's bitcher boomed, evidently set on full volume. "_Mattaku shirazu_," he said. "Excuse. Pia not teach entire use of Standard tongue."

Hartford's right hand tore through the plastic pellicle over his Dardick-pistol and brought the weapon to bear on the figure before him. "You're a Stinker!" he said. "Pia's safety-suit--that's the suit you're wearing."

"_Tonshu_," the Indigenous Hominid said, bowing his head. He indicated the empty holster at his side: he was unarmed. "I come on _taku_, here to your honored precincts, to speak of things done and of future things. You are Hartford?"

Hartford thought quickly. His responsibility was to the Garrison. This stranger was above all else a possible source of contamination, a carrier of the micro-bugs that could kill every Axenite on Kansas. Shooting him would rupture the safety-suit he wore. As it was, his exterior surface was clean; he could have entered the Barracks only by marching in from Retreat with the rest of the regiment, through the sterilizing Syphon. "I am Hartford. Lee Hartford."

* * * * *

"Pia said you are a good man," the stranger said, bowing.

"What is your name?"

"Renkei. As you say, I take Pia's _uwa-zutsumi_, this smooth garment." Renkei indicated the safety-suit by slicking his hands over it. "I must enter here to talk with Hartford. To enter, I must have garment. Pia, my brother, is dead. I borrowed his garment. Can I, with you, stop the ugly thing that began last night in Kansannamura? _Kuwashiku wa zonzezu_; I do not know. I can but try."

What a perfect disguise a safety-suit made, Hartford thought. Besides, it was the only passport a man needed to enter the Barracks. He stared at the stranger. He looked no different to men Hartford had met before, Axenites whose grandparents had been born by aseptic Caesarian section in Nagoya or Canton, two of the great gnotobiotic centers of fifty years ago. Renkei was a Stinker, a Kansan, an Indigenous Hominid (ignominious name!); he was also, Hartford felt, a man.

"Tell me why you made the dangerous journey here, into the midst of your enemies," he said.

"The death of our friend Pia. The burning of Kansannamura. The war between my people and you who wear smooth garments," he said. "This is _aru-majiki koto_."

"A thing that ought not to be," Hartford said, translating. He was glad for the practice he'd gotten with Pia, speaking the native tongue. "Sit down," he said. "You must explain, Renkei."

The refresher-room, a hall filled with lockers and the machinery that automatically tested and refitted the safety-suits each time they returned to the Barracks, had a dozen entrances and exits. As Renkei, still completely sealed in Pia's safety-suit, sat on the bench beside Hartford, the doors all closed at once. They hissed as the pneumatic seals were set in their frames.

Contamination Alert! Someone, most likely the Service girl on watch at the Status Board, had discovered that there was one more person in the Barracks than could be accounted for. A crash-priority head-count had been made. Each room and compartment had doubtless been eavesdropped through the built-in TV eyes and microphone ears.

One door at the far end of the hall burst open. A squad of safety-suited Service Police spilled in. At the point of their wedge was the scarlet uniform of Colonel Nef. Dardick-pistol in hand, he ran toward Renkei. "Don't shoot!" Hartford shouted, springing up.

"Get back, Mister," the colonel yelled. He dropped to one knee and squeezed all twelve rounds into the seated figure to Hartford's right. Service Police swooped down to pull Hartford away from the shattered body of Renkei. The lieutenant's tee-shirt was stained, however, by flecks of blood splashed up as the SPs' bullets chewed into the Kansan. Hartford was contaminated.

* * * * *

For the next hour, Hartford had no more to say about his disposition than an angry bullock being dipped and scrubbed against an epidemic of cattle ticks.

His purification consisted in a sudsing with antiseptic soaps, this administered by a team of three Service Company gnotobioticians who were completely indifferent to his modesty and who seemed determined to peel off the outer surface of his skin. The women, safety-suited against being themselves contaminated, shaved off all his hair and ostentatiously packaged-up the shavings to be burned. They administered parenteral and enteric doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics. By the time the gnoto girls were finished, Hartford was as bald all over as a six-weeks foetus, as sore as though he'd been sand-blasted, slightly feverish as a result of the injections and madder than hell.

Ignoring his demands to see Colonel Nef at once, the Service Company troopers helped him into his safety-suit. Hartford would have to live inside the suit for a week's quarantine, watched carefully to see whether a missed microbe would breed within him in spite of all the measures taken.

Hartford's company commander refused him permission to speak to the colonel. The lieutenant was to speak to no one concerning Renkei's invasion of the Barracks. He would remain safety-suited inside the Barracks or out; but would otherwise continue with his regular duties.

Hartford returned to the refresher-room where the murder had taken place. Renkei's macerated body had been removed for burning. The room had been carefully decontaminated, to the extent of hosing it down with detergent steam and individually re-refreshing each safety-suit in the huge hall's rows of lockers.

There was nothing to be done against Nef's madness, Hartford thought. He sat on the bench where Renkei had sat. The ultimate breakdown in communication is silencing one side of the dialogue, he thought. That's why killing a man is the ultimate sin; it removes forever the hope of understanding him. It ends for all time the conversation by which brothers may touch one another's mind.

What crap to find in a soldier's thoughts, Hartford told himself. He was an Axenite trooper, a Pioneer, a pistol-packing officer of infantry, commander of the Terrible Third Platoon. He was an Axenite, dedicated by the immaculacy of his birth to the conquest of Man's frontiers.

Hartford snapped his plastic-sheathed Dardick-pistol, death in a supermarket wrapper, from his belt and placed it on the shelf of his locker. He'd seen the village of Kansannamura burned. Pia had died across his shoulder. Paula lay buried, too. Renkei's life had been splashed out on a stream of bullets. Enough of death.

Hartford picked up a pack of field-ration squeeze-tubes and walked down the hallway toward the Syphon.

His leaving would show on the Status Board, of course, but that didn't matter any more. He was deserting the regiment.

* * * * *

He walked through the valley of desert that was the Hot Gut, and down into the birth-canal that was the Wet Gut, to emerge in the evening air of Kansas. The motor sergeant, stationed outside to guard the vehicles, saluted. "Going for a walk, sir?" he asked.

"If you'll lend me a jeep, I'll go for a ride," Hartford said. "I'd like to see how things look, down in the village."

"It's against regulations, but if you'll have the truck back by dark I can let it go, sir."

"Thank you, Sergeant." Hartford returned the salute and drove off downhill, toward Kansannamura.

What would happen to Hartford-the-deserter? he wondered. At best, he'd be booted out of the troopers and grounded on Titan, or Luna or one of the M'Bwene planets, to serve the rest of his life as a paper-pusher, the bureaucratic equivalent of an endless Kitchen Police. At worst, he'd be exiled to Earth.

That meant exposure to bacteria, a gradual contamination till he'd been exposed to the full dirtiness in which earthlings daily lived, till he'd equipped himself with antibodies and a Stinker's immune-response.

The Service Police would be after him soon. Once out of sight of the Barracks, he turned his jeep off the road, onto one of the numberless paths used by camelopard riders on their trips between Stinker villages. He was headed upgrade, now, toward the mountains. On either side of the jeep were the fields of sunflowers, silent in the twilight calm. In a few moments the cool winds from the sea would flow into the land, stirring the billions of heart-shaped sunflower-leaves into the whisper that filled the evening and early-morning hours of Kansas.

His heart filled with hope and hopelessness, feeling like a happy suicide, Hartford sang to himself as the sunflower heads and leaves tattooed against his windshield. _Pioneers! O Pioneers_ he sang, the anthem of the Axenites, the fellowship he was leaving forever:

Lo, the darting bowling orb! Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets, All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!